Premium Episode 136 - United Fruit Company, Blood Bananas and the Guatemalan Genocide pt. 3: Bloody Colombia, el Bogotazo, and Operation Pantomime

[originally published on Patreon February 23, 2024] In this episode I discuss Colombia's relationship to United Fruit Company aka El Pulpo. In particular, I open with the massive strikes against UFC in 1928 culminating in the massacre at Ciénaga which was so memorably fictionalized in Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad.  From there, I discuss the curious case of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and his assassination in 1948 which triggered El Bogotazo, a wave of civil unrest and violence that would affect Colombia for years to come. I discuss the Rosicrucian-brainwashed patsy shooter Juan Roa Sierra and his manipulation by a German astrologer spy named Johann Umland Gerät.  It gets even weirder as a track down claims by a Sicilian-American WWII vet named John Meeples Espirito who appears to have been involved in Operation ARTICHOKE and who found his way to revolutionary Cuba. When arrested, he told Cuban intelligence of his role in the assassination of Gaitán - claims which Cuban intelligence could never definitively prove and so did not widely publish.  The potential reason for that, according to some, was because of Fidel Castro's role and actions in El Bogotazo, which remains obscured, as through a glass darkly. Much remains unknown.